Beneath The Stains of Time
by eden alice
Summary: 'It seemed impossible to stop moving.' Scully trying to live after the events of The Truth.


Beneath The Stains of Time

It seemed impossible to stop moving, as if they were caught up within so much impetus they would never be able to fully stop. Only Mulder did seem to have stopped, in an old pair of jeans and a sports related t-shirt that would look more at home on a teenager. He surveyed home made shelves with a kind absent minded focus that used to mean that he was about to run off and abandon her for a crazy quest only to resurface in a few days when he needed Dr Scully to save his ass.

But things were different now. Long ago (in a land far, far away) the outside pieces of her life had collapse around her leaving only the FBI, a man and his pursuit for the truth. It had become her pursuit too, once it had seeped into her blood (abduction, cancer, a dead sister, people on fire and a tiny piece of metal in the back of her neck). And then even that was taken away from them (dates and prophecies were possibly all for nothing for all they could do about it).

She looked into the mirror in dingy motels and fast food restaurant bathrooms at her still alien ash blond hair and green eyes (coloured contacts that made her eyes sting when she stared at her computer) and freckled golden tan over the bridge of her nose and wonders just how much of herself had been worn away in the effort to survive. The desperately sad look on her mothers face as if she was looking at a stranger from all those years ago still haunted her when she closed her eyes at night. Maybe with most of her physical belongings pieces of her soul had broken away, making her more streamline and the lessening the pain.

And now they do not have to run any more but she struggles to stand still or remember to be herself anymore. She still keeps a gun in the waistband of her trousers yet Mulder is the paranoid one.

And now she had a home. A home in the middle of nowhere with a front door, garden and a bedroom that was there's.

She wished she could stop and appreciate it all, she had him and that used to be enough.

"I don't want to do autopsies anymore, Mulder." She informed him solemnly, lying down on the bed the other side of the room from the half successful DIY attempt.

She did not want to spend any more time with the dead, not remembering how she used to be able to spend day after day surrounded by cool steel and empty eyes. When had pathology become something that made her feel so uneasy, the combination of everything she once was?

The tendons in Mulder's neck pulled taunt as he looked over his shoulder at her, his brown eyes rich with confusion for a moment before quickly melting away into an expression of understanding. He had been expecting this, maybe it was the unopened bottle of anti-depressants hidden in the bathroom cabinet (she'd be surprised if Mulder and his uncanny power of observation had missed the tiny bottle but they were very good at ignoring the obvious between them). Or possibly it was they way he'd wake up in the night to find her side of the bed cool and empty, hell, it could even be simply that she seemed to be constantly slightly agitated, like she had drunk one too many cups of coffee.

"Okay." He offered back in

She pulls him flush against her chest, taking comfort from his warmth. She closes her eyes and tries not to imagine the incisions she could make wilding her scalpel, how pale and cold he would look (looked) on the cold steel of a morgue table (He had died so often and living was so fleeting and sometimes she finds herself staring at him in wonder. How can he really be here?).

This is better, healthier than the time she recklessly took the blade to her own pale skin, watched as beaded red swelled, ruining her précised lines, flowing vivid and angry before clotting could occur (Three months she can't remember, a dead little girl who was never really hers, a son that she could not hold on to and monsters lurking in her bathroom). After she hid the stinging wounds from him because it was private and because he would make her feel like an angst driven teenager with that puppy dog look of concern and it was never about that.

Her fingers trace familiar shapes on lanky limbs, she reads brail scars like equations with her finger tips and lips (_E_ = _mc_2). He has been physically hurt because of the conspiracy, because of his sister and his quest and so had she. Suddenly she does not feel so alone.

This was better because he knows she is using him (she needs him so much. Sometimes he awakes from a nightmare and holds her silently in the dead of night, she can taste the salt of tears against his neck) and he is willing to let her. After all the years he seems to understand that they can not keep each other from their pain but the gentle kiss he places on her forehead tells her he will be there to catch her.


End file.
